Ruth Mittelmann

“One day, they sent me a message through Lenka that the women from Lidice invited me to join them at their table. It was a great honour, because they were aristocracy in the camp, let’s say. Nobody yelled at them, and so it was an honour. They had certainly heard about me from Lenka and they noticed that I was not speaking German. I really accepted their offer and I was getting food at their table – the table in quotation marks. One day, when food was distributed, I received a ladle with… The room commander who was distributing the food, had a large bone with meat on that ladle. I can still see it even now, she was holding it and she was mean, very mean and she was looking at us and deciding to whom she would give it so that the others would be jealous and she gave it to me so that all the others would envy me. Obviously, I suggested that each of the women take one bite of it, what else was there to do. I would not be able to eat it, that was not possible, the eyes of all of them were glued to me. And so we shared it.”

“One day they announced to us – we were block no. 27 – that all Jews, or Jewish women, we were only women there, from the block no. 27 would go to blocks no. 30 or no. 31, because there would be an evacuation. My Czech friends heard it and they said: ‘You will not go.’ On the day when the Jewish women left the block no. 27 they took me, they covered me with something, I don’t know what it was, but I was under some blankets, and they took away my triangle and they replaced it with their Czech triangle. I was no longer a Jew, I was a Czech. Only one of them, the room commander, knew about it, and she recognized me and she threatened that she would inform upon me, but the women told her: ‘If you turn her in, you cannot even imagine what would then happen to you.’ She thus did not dare.”

“I think that in 1938 one member of Maccabi Ha Tzair, his name was Imi Ruik, came to campaign, as we called it, to convince us to join the movement. I wanted to go and my mom agreed, but my father was strongly opposed to that. He was not a Zionist at all, he did not have a single Zionist cell in his body. He said: ‘Living with so many Jews in that Palestine, this does not suit me at all.’ He did not intend to go to Palestine. Nevertheless, I was going to Maccabi Ha Tzair.”